Joe Dowd: Zuckerberg’s epic dressing down on Capitol Hill

You almost felt sorry for him. That suit he wore must have felt like a straitjacket.

He seemed to be squirming in it before the Senate committee, with the old sharks circling around the 33-year-old wunderkind.

And there was blood in the water.

Despite all his billions and international fame, despite the adulation of his generation, no one bothered to teach him how to tie a half-Windsor.

You almost wanted to take him aside and say it’s got to be tight, young man. It’s emblematic of the world we regular folks are forced to choke down daily. You’ve got to jam it hard up against your Adam’s apple in order to form that signature dimple below the knot.

It takes practice, and Mark Zuckerberg was clearly not polished in the ways of a world without hoodies.

Facebook began in his Harvard dormitory 14 years ago and morphed into a platform of cat pictures and streams of life events. Now we have hundreds of virtual “friends,” yet we wonder how many of them would cross the street to help us in a real-life crisis.

Now, the social network has billions of users wondering just how badly their privacy has been violated. It’s also clear that 87 million Facebook users had their data scraped for a right-wing agent of the Trump campaign. That, in turn, allowed Cambridge Analytica to assist the Russians in interfering in our 2016 election.

Zuckerberg followed the counsel of the best lawyers and advisors money could buy. After all, this isn’t Silicon Valley; it’s Capitol Hill, where t-shirts are banned and the ties are always perfect. He offered contrition:

“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well,” Zuckerberg told the Senate Tuesday. “And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.” Even if all the information stolen from our digital imprints didn’t turn the tide of the election, the Facebook scandal represents a basic violation of our privacy rights. But if merely one vote was changed – just one – because of the vile disinformation spewed across our Facebook feeds, it would constitute an attack on our democracy.

The boy genius trapped in the blue suit, and the rest of the Congress, need to answer for that.

4 comments

That is right RE. Mr. Dowd is constantly spinning his leftist views and mentality in his articles. Makes it always the RNC and Trump is wrong and his party is a saint. I quote Senator Thom Tillis:
“When you do your research on Cambridge Analytica, I would appreciate it if you would start back from the first high-profile national campaign that exploited Facebook data,” Tillis said.

The North Carolina lawmaker then cited a former Obama campaign staffer’s tweet, which was sent after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, and recounted how Facebook employees were surprised by the breadth of user data the campaign was able to scrape, but let them continue to do so because of their shared political leanings.

“I also believe that that person who may have looked the other way when the whole social graph was extracted for the Obama campaign, if they are still working for you, they probably should not,” Tillis scolded. “At least there should be a business code of conduct that says that you do not play favorites. You are trying to create a fair place for people to share ideas.”

The problem on FB is not the legit ads or the various news streams that show up on your page because of your preferences and likes. Who writes that stuff and what their political leaning are is pretty obvious. The problem in the last election cycle were all the bots that “pushed” Fake News stories (truly fake news and not just the stuff that our President disagrees with) on people who thought they were real stories from real people and real news sites. Such a practice if it continues into the next election cycle is what undermines our democracy.

So, no worries about influencing “merely one vote” when it was a Democrat who won in 2012? What about all of the far left ads that are all over Facebook as well – Occupy Democrats, Vox, HuffPost, BuzzFeed… no worries about their “merely one vote” potential?